Word.ws English Dictionary

rhinocerus

rhinocerus is the misspelling of rhinoceros.

Meaning of rhinoceros

Noun

rhinoceros (plural rhinoceros or rhinoceroses or (uncommon) rhinocerosses or (nonstandard) rhinoceri or (nonstandard) rhinoceroi or (now rare) rhinocerotes)

  1. Any large herbivorous ungulate mammal native to Africa and Asia of the family Rhinocerotidae, with thick, gray skin and one or two horns on their snouts.
    • Herein therefore to draw up our determinations beside the several pieces of Scripture mentioning this Animal (which some may well contend to be only meant of the Rhinoceros) we are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirme there are many kinds thereof. In the number of...1658, Thomas Brown, “Of Unicorns Horn”, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or Enquiries Into Very many Received Tenents And commonly Presumed Truths. The Fourth Edition, page 203
    Synonyms:
    rhino, rhinocerotid
  2. An ungulate mammal of the superfamily Rhinocerotoidea, including the hornless Paraceratherium.

Origin of rhinocerus

Back-formation from the erroneous plural rhinoceri, by analogy with Latin words ending in -us that become -ī in the plural.

Questions about rhinocerus

What is rhinocerus the misspelling of?
Rhinocerus is the misspelling of rhinoceros.

Words near rhinocerus in the dictionary

  1. rhinocerotiform
  2. rhinocerotine
  3. rhinocerotoid
  4. rhinocerotoids
  5. rhinocerots
  6. rhinocerus
  7. rhinochimaerid
  8. rhinochimaerids
  9. rhinocleisis
  10. rhinocnesmus
  11. rhinoconjunctivitis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rhinocerus (page history and authors); rhinoceros (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “rhinocerus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rhinocerus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.